Times and Seasons (18 page)

As
Cathy crossed the cul de sac to return home, an old pickup truck pulled up to her curb, with an elderly weatherbeaten man behind the wheel. Annie was just pulling into the driveway, and she got out of her car and met Cathy in the yard before the man got out.

“Mom, I know you and Steve are kind of on hold, but really, you can do better than that.”

Cathy elbowed her daughter in the ribs. “Who is he?”

“Like I know?”

Cathy crossed the yard to meet him as he got out of the truck. He smiled at her, flashing a decaying front tooth. “May I help you?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Sorry to come by so late, but I just need to scope out the backyard and make sure everything’s ready for tomorrow.”

“Ready for tomorrow?” Cathy asked. “What’s happening tomorrow?”

“We’re starting work on the new addition on the house, that’s what,” the man said. “Ain’t nobody told you?”

She frowned. “Well, no. I mean, I thought we postponed it.”

“Can’t postpone it,” he said. “You got a contract.”

Cathy thought back to the document she and Steve had signed with the contractor weeks ago. The man had so much business that he’d put them on a long list and promised to get started at least a month before the wedding. He had the slabs poured weeks ago, but he was late beginning the construction. Neither Cathy nor Steve had thought to tell him the wedding had been called off.

“Well, your boss has so much business it won’t matter to him. He can tear up the contract, can’t he?”

“No, ma’am,” the truck driver said. “Never heard of him tearing up one yet. He’s got him a lawyer, though, that presses pretty hard when it comes to breach of contract.”

Cathy gaped at him. “Are you telling me that you’re going to start work on my house tomorrow whether I want you to or not?”

“All I’m doing is following orders, ma’am. He told me to come and make sure everything was ready to start.”

“How do you mean, ‘ready’?” Cathy asked. “Apparently it’s not ‘ready,’ since I don’t want it done—at least not yet.”

“Take it up with him. Mind if I walk around to the back and look at the foundation?” He started around the back before she could answer.

“Excuse me!” She trotted behind the man. “Do you have your boss’s phone number on you? I need to talk to him immediately.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. He pulled a leaky ballpoint pen out of his ink-stained pocket. “Got something to write on?”

She didn’t, so she stuck out her hand. “Here, just write it on my hand. I’ll go in and call him right now.”

He seemed amused that he was writing on flesh, but he jotted the number down. Then scanning the work that had already been done, he said, “Tell him it looks okay. Won’t be no problem starting in the morning.”

“There definitely
will
be a problem starting in the morning,” Cathy said, “but I’ll take care of that right now.”

She went into the house and dialed the number. A man yelled hello into the phone, and she could hear something like a jackhammer buzzing behind him.

“Mr. Barksdale?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

At least he was polite. “This is Cathy Flaherty over on Cedar Circle.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Sorry it took us so long to get to your house, but I sent my man out there tonight to check to make sure we could start in the morning.”

“Well, that’s just it. He’s here,” Cathy said. “Look, about that contract. I was wondering if there was any way we could just cancel it. We’ll do another one later when we’re ready to build.”

“Cancel it?” he asked. “What happened? Your boyfriend dump you?”

She caught her breath. “No, he didn’t dump me!”

“You dumped him, then?”

“No! Nobody dumped anybody. We’ve just postponed the wedding for a while.”

“Well, I’m sorry, ma’am. After the foundation was poured and everything.”

“Yes, well…We’ll build eventually, but I just can’t handle it right now.”

“I understand completely,” he said, though that jackhammer buzzing in the background made her wonder if he could even hear her. “No problem, ma’am.”

“Then you can refund our money?” she asked.

He hesitated. “I’m sorry. Come again?”

“I asked if you could refund our check,” she yelled.

“Well, now, nobody said anything about that.”

“I just did. I said it. If we’re not having the work done yet, then we shouldn’t have to pay.”

“But there’s a contract, ma’am.”

“But you just said we could get out of that. You just said—”

The jackhammer on his end stopped. “Oh, I’ll postpone the building,” he said. “Even cancel it entirely, if you want. But I can’t return the money.” He chuckled, as if the whole concept was absurd. “If I did that, I’d have folks pulling out on me left and right. Contracts are binding, ma’am.”

“But you have business coming out your ears! You’re already weeks later than we agreed. It won’t hurt you to let this go. I’ve been having some personal problems. If you have any compassion at all…”

“Ma’am, if my business hung on people’s love lives, I’d be bankrupt in a month.”

“My personal problems have nothing to do with my love life!” She wadded the roots of her hair in frustration. “Look, would you call my fiancé and let
him
explain this to you?”

“Fiancé? Thought you said you weren’t getting married.”

“I don’t know what we’re going to do. Just call him, will you?” She spouted out his number at work, then hung up the phone.

“Mom, that man’s out there spray-painting the yard,” Annie said.

“Spray-painting it?” Cathy asked. She ran to the back door and flung it open. The man was painting lines on their grass with bright orange neon paint.

“Why won’t they listen to me?” She swung around to Annie. “Am I invisible? Can people not hear me?”

“I hear you, Mom, loud and clear,” Annie said. “I’ve never had any trouble hearing you.”

Cathy looked back in the yard again. “Okay, if he wants to paint up our yard, that’s fine. I’ll just go rinse it off as soon as he leaves. I don’t have the energy to fight with him again.”

She sat down at the kitchen table, her fingers threaded through her hair.

“He’s leaving,” Annie said, still peering out the window.

Cathy listened until his old truck started up, vibrating the neighborhood.

“Crisis passed,” Cathy said with a sigh. “Steve will take care of it. That was all I needed. A construction project in the middle of everything.”

“Maybe I could get a job doing construction,” Annie said thoughtfully as she stared at the backyard. “Instead of college, you know? I can paint lines in neon.”

“Yeah, and you’re sometimes just as deaf as those guys are.” She got back up and went to the box she’d brought home with the pictures of the Nicaraguan children. “I’m just going to forget about it. Steve will take care of it. I have to organize these pictures. Annie, will you help me?”

Annie looked at her watch. “Right now?”

“You weren’t doing anything,” Cathy said. “You’ve been hanging around talking about construction work.” She went to the closet and got out the slide projector, set it on the coffee table, and focused it on the wall.

Annie shrugged. “Well, I guess I could help for a little while,” she said. She sat down on the couch next to Cathy and started flipping through the papers that were stacked under the slides. “So what are these?”

“They’re Sylvia’s narratives,” Cathy said. “I’ve got to figure out which thing goes with which slide and make sure everything’s in order. It’s for the presentation I’m doing Sunday.”

“Cool,” Annie said. “Yeah, I’ll help.” She put the first slide in, and they saw the group of orphans who lived at the school where Sylvia helped. It looked like any other class of children, only the kids’ clothes were less elaborate, more faded.

Cathy ran through the narrative that Tory had given her about the picture. Annie changed slides—a close-up of three children who didn’t look quite as healthy as the ones in the previous picture. Their hair was dirty and messed up, stringing in their eyes. They were barefoot and dressed in clothes with holes and dirt.

“Who are these?” Annie asked.

Cathy searched through her notes. “These are kids from the community who come to get food,” she said. “Look how skinny they are.”

Annie’s eyes grew serious. “They are skinny,” she said. She turned to the next slide: a little boy with toothpick legs and a distended belly. His eyes were dull.

“Says here his name is Miguel,” Cathy said.

“Miguel?” Annie asked. “What about him? Is he an orphan?”

“No, he’s got a mother, according to this. But they don’t have food. His father was killed in the hurricane, and his mother hasn’t been able to make a living. It says she brought him to the orphanage for Sylvia to keep until she could get on her feet.” Annie stared at the little boy who looked no more than four. “Mom, that’s awful. Don’t they have, like, welfare or something?”

“No, Annie, they don’t. That’s an American thing. Besides, the Bible tells us that we’re supposed to help people in need, not wait for the government to do it. So that’s what Sylvia is trying to do, and that’s why we’re trying to raise money. So little boys like Miguel won’t have to suffer.”

She changed slides and saw Sylvia holding the little boy on her hip. He had his arms around her neck and was kissing her on the cheek.

Annie smiled. “He looks better here, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Cathy said. “Go to the next slide.”

Annie switched slides, and a picture of the same little boy came up on the screen. His eyes had a twinkle in them now, and his stomach wasn’t swollen. His little legs had fattened up to normal proportions.

“Oh, look,” Cathy said. “This is after they’ve been feeding him for a month. He looks so much better. Look at his eyes.”

“He’s in there now,” Annie said. “He just looked like a little shell, before.”

“He’s just one example,” Cathy said. “Go to the next one.”

They went to the next one and saw another “before” picture of a little girl with stringy hair, dirt on her face, and a chipped front tooth. She was wearing a smock dress that was too little for her. In the next picture, she saw her with Sylvia, playing with some other children. Then there was a picture of her eating beans and rice out of a bowl…then an “after” picture a couple of months after they had been feeding her. She looked normal and healthier and had that same sparkle in her eye that Miguel had had.

“Mom, that’s amazing,” Annie said. “I always thought of Sylvia being over there just preaching to people, standing on street corners and passing out tracts or something. I didn’t realize she was really helping people.”

Cathy gave a dry laugh. “Annie, how can you say that? Sharing Christ with people
is
helping them!”

“Oh, I know it is,” Annie said. “I mean, in theory. But the truth is she’s doing more than that. She’s filling their little stomachs.”

“Well, not for long,” Cathy said. “If we don’t get people to send her money, she’s not going to be able to fill anybody’s stomach. She and Dr. Harry have decided to sell their house to raise it.”

“No way! Mom!”

“I know. It makes me sick. But maybe if we raise enough money through the churches, they’ll reconsider.”

Annie switched slides, and Cathy came back to sit down beside her. They saw Sylvia and some of the other missionaries working in the orphanage, teaching school to the children who were grouped according to their ages. They were all clean and well cared for.

“They didn’t come to her like this,” Cathy said. “Look at the next one.”

Annie put the next slide in and flashed it on the wall. It was a shot of some of the same children she had just seen, only they were in rags and covered with dirt and mud, sores and scrapes. Some of them were crying, and their noses were crusted with mucus. They were all hopelessly skinny and looked desperately afraid.

Cathy swallowed. “That was when they came to her after the hurricane,” she said. “Her friends, the other two missionaries, thought they were going down there to build a school. They couldn’t get any students to come to it, but then the hurricane hit and orphaned children started showing up, brought by people who had no way to care for them. And they finally realized that God hadn’t sent them there to build a school at all. He sent them there to build an orphanage.”

Annie’s eyes rounded as she looked at her mother. “Mom, that’s awesome,” she whispered.

“Yeah, only they need lots more workers. They don’t have enough. And they need money.”

Annie looked back at the slide. “And we’re sitting here so fat and happy.”

Cathy grinned. “Annie, what do you weigh?”

“A hundred ten pounds.” She giggled. “Well, I didn’t mean literally fat. I just meant that we have everything we need. And even most of the stuff we want.”

“Sylvia said they can feed 100 children—maybe even 150—on $400 a month,” Cathy said. “One child, for four dollars at the most. For a
month.
Isn’t that amazing?”

“Yeah,” Annie whispered. “Awesome.”

Cathy saw the tears in her daughter’s eyes as she flipped through the slides, watching the images on the wall as if these people were coming to life before her. It moved Cathy to see that Annie could be touched this way.

“So do you want to come help me at the luncheon Sunday?” she asked. “I’m going to need help with the slide projector, and since you’ve already been through the slides, you’d know what to do.”

Annie dabbed at the tears dotting her eyes. “Sure, I can do that,” she said. “It’s the least I can do, I guess. I have a date with Jimmy, but I can get out of it.” She considered the next slide. “You know how I’ve been saving for that new CD player?”

“Yeah,” Cathy said.

“I don’t need it,” Annie said. “What if I just send the money to Miss Sylvia? Would it help much?”

“How much is it?” Cathy asked.

“I’ve got about $100 so far.”

Cathy smiled. “Annie, do you think feeding twenty-five kids for a month is ‘doing something’? Because that’s how many kids a hundred dollars would feed. Maybe even more.”

“Well, yeah, but I mean, is that really true, or is that just a figure Miss Sylvia made up to make it sound dramatic?”